Anthology, Inc. is owned by Von Hoffmann Press. Located in Arlington Heights IL, the company employs 150 in its creative and prepress operation that provides educational publishers with a full range of services in the production of educational materials, from concept to completion. This includes editorial services from product conceptualization to production proofreading, design and art/photo services, composition, and conventional and electronic prepress services. The company has a mostly educational focus, with extensive classroom and publishing experience across all grade levels and subject areas.
When Anthology first acquired Virtual Ticket in 1999, it was to replace a homegrown image management system that was used to track and document images and transparencies received as part of the various projects in which the company was engaged. At the time, Anthology was using Covalent for shop floor management.
"We were attracted to Virtual Ticket by its openness and flexibility," says Cliff Lewis, Systems Support Manager. "We were able to easily develop our own job tickets to accommodate our existing workflow, and with Virtual Ticket's digital asset management capabilities, improve our ability to track and manage images, transparencies, and Photoshop work as well."
As Virtual Ticket became an increasingly central part of Anthology's workflow, according to Lewis, the company decided to switch its shop floor data collection from Covalent to Job Manager. He says, "We were using Access to connect the two systems, but we believed having everything in one database, including the total job history, would be much more advantageous. We worked with MetaCommunications to migrate current data from Covalent to Job Manager. Once that was completed, we switched everyone over to Job Manager effective January 1, 2005."
Lewis reports that the migration was a fairly simple process, and it was well worth the effort to be able to benefit from a completely integrated solution. He adds, "Now we have an end-to-end workflow that is managed through a single, easy-to-use interface."
The more we do with Virtual Ticket and Job Manager, the more powerful we find the system to be.
Cliff Lewis, Systems Support Manager
Today at Anthology, sales personnel create estimates and orders in the system using customized Virtual Ticket forms that are designed to track revenue streams for the project, schedule jobs, estimate workload to various departments including art and photo and design. Once a project becomes a live job in the system, sales personnel then have a complete view of each cost center in real time as the job progresses through its various steps. "We have a fairly complex workflow," comments Lewis. "One thing we realized early on is that, for us, a job does not simply have one due date. We process about 14,000 jobs per year, and each job can easily have 50 to 100 work orders associated with it, each with its own production schedule and workflow. Virtual Ticket and Job Manager make it easy to track the entire job, including its individual schedules and revenue streams.
Lewis explains that Anthology's work orders have six steps available. He says, "For example, Chapter 14 of a given book might go through composition, proofreading, prepress, and then to final quality control. These are all different steps in the process, and each would have its own due date. Collectively, using Virtual Ticket, we can monitor the workload in each cost center and assigned to each operator. As each step is completed, the operator simply clicks a completed box on the form, and the project automatically goes to the next person in the workflow, giving them a real-time list of assigned jobs in their to-do list."
How has this integrated solution affected Anthology's operations? According to Lewis, "It has really changed the way we manage work throughout the shop, and our entire staff has embraced the process. Before we implemented Virtual Ticket and Job Manager, it was too easy for one or more of the steps in these complex projects to fall through the cracks. Plus, we didn't have documentation of all of those steps and the production time associated with them, making it difficult to accurately bill our clients. Now, everything is in one place and our operation is much more efficient."
Lewis says that although the company sought customization support from MetaCommunications in the early days, it is so easy to build the database and to customize forms that most of it is now done internally. He says, "The more we do with Virtual Ticket and Job Manager, the more powerful we find the system to be. You can program MetaScript to run in the background of forms to help simplify data entry. You can also program in SQL on the server so that when it sees a specific event happen, it will trigger other events. For example, when an employee marks a task as complete or does a save, certain events are automatically triggered that ensure consistent data collection and timely transition of the project to the next step." Anthology is constantly adding new functionality to the system. "Right now," says Lewis, "we are connecting our UPS shipping system to Virtual Ticket. Shipment information will be sent to the UPS machine and shipping acknowledgment and UPS Tracking numbers will be returned to Virtual Ticket."
Lewis remarks that recently he and his colleagues were reflecting on the benefits Virtual Ticket and Job Manager have delivered. He says, "We used to have department-lead meetings with five people every morning for one and a half hours to plan and track what had to be done that day. That consumed almost 250 man-days a year of expensive supervisory time. Back in those days, we were probably producing 200,000 pages per year with a staff of 80 or 90. Now we are producing closer to two million pages a year — an increase of a factor of ten — with less than double the staff, and we don't have those meetings at all. Status of every production step of a project is available in Virtual Ticket. It is monitored by managers, supervisors and the assigned staff members. Now, nothing falls through the cracks because every production step is documented. From our perspective today, it seems strange that we had to spend so much time on those meetings for such a little amount of work."
